NRC, Dominion to Discuss Post-Earthquake Actions Taken at North Anna

Following last month’s earthquake in Virginia, everyone’s interested in learning more about the quake’s effects on the nearby North Anna nuclear power plant. The plant’s operator, Dominion, has information to share, so the NRC’s ready to listen.

NRC staff will meet with Dominion management from 1 – 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8, in the Commissioners’ Conference Room on the first floor of the NRC’s One White Flint North building, at 11555 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Md. Having a public meeting on such short notice is very unusual, but Dominion’s information on such a unique situation needs to be discussed in a formal, open setting as soon as possible.

The NRC wants to make sure you have the opportunity to see what’s been learned, so the meeting will be available on the Live NRC Meeting page. Members of the public can attend the meeting by coming through security at the NRC’s One White Flint North entrance, at the corner of Rockville Pike and Marinelli Road in Rockville. The NRC is across the street from the White Flint Metro stop.

Dominion is expected to discuss its latest analysis of ground motion at the North Anna site, which sits about 12 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter in Louisa, Va. The company is also expected to describe its next steps in determining whether the plant meets NRC requirements to restart.

The two-reactor North Anna plant shut down safely following the quake, with both reactors operating as designed. Ongoing analysis by both the NRC and Dominion indicates the earthquake may have subjected the plant to more ground movement than specified in the plants’ designs. An NRC Augmented Inspection Team has been examining North Anna for the past week and the team plans to continue its work for another week. When the team completes its inspection, the NRC will hold a meeting near North Anna to discuss their preliminary results, and a final report is expected by the middle of October.

Why can’t people just wise up? Nuclear power is here to stay, so they could better utilize their time that they spend fighting it, by learning ways to make it better than it is today. Protesting and complaining is disruptive at best….the perfect example of wasted energy (pun intented)!

Japanese authorities made the decision about how and when to issue evacuation orders around the Fukushima site. The U.S. State Department, with input from the NRC, also issued an evacuation order for U.S. citizens living within 50 miles of the plant. That “travel advisory” was later modified, and additional modifications are expected.

Don’t let anti-nukers hijack the hearing! DON’T shy mentioning Fukushima –as they WILL — but slap them back reminding the public that this freakish “worst case scenerio” x3 resulted in zero deaths nor damage outside the facility, and any local health effect has been way less than from a normal coal plant on a NORMAL day — so the mass evacuation there was largely an over-reaction too! Chemical plants and Bio-labs storing and experimenting with plague-class pathogens aren’t demanded to have evacuation plans. Wonder why!

Archives

Archives

Comments on blog posts do not represent official NRC communication, and links to internet sites other than the NRC website do not constitute the agency’s endorsement of that site’s content, policies or products. Please read our Disclaimer for more information.